The Performance Problem That Doesn’t Show on the Absence Report
Do you feel that something’s not right even though your absence figures are fine, your EAP is in place, and you’ve run a Mental Health Awareness Week? Perhaps some of your best people have quietly stopped putting their hands up, and meetings that used to spark ideas now just run to time. Maybe leaders who were once energising are now just managing, and teams are technically functioning, but no one would describe them as thriving.
That’s presenteeism, and it costs UK businesses two to three times as much as absenteeism. It doesn’t show on a spreadsheet until it becomes a resignation, a team that’s gone flat, or a senior person running so far on empty they stop being the asset you hired.
Standard wellbeing programmes don’t reach these people because they don’t think they qualify. They’re not in crisis. They’re just drained, disconnected, going through the motions, and far too professional to say so.
Why the usual approaches don’t work
EAPs, therapy, mindfulness apps, and resilience frameworks are not wrong. They serve the population that engages with them, typically 5-10% of any UK workforce. However, our Beyond Coping workplace wellbeing programme is designed for the 90% who don’t.
Existing provision is built around coping with a problem once it presents itself. That model assumes employees will recognise issues in themselves, name them, and put their hand up for help. The presenteeism population, by definition, does none of those three things. They keep showing up and keep delivering. They also keep soaking it up, which means the cost compounds quietly until it surfaces later.
This is not a critique of the services already in place. It’s a description of what they were designed to do, and what they were not. Beyond Coping sits alongside them, not in place of them. The opposite of presenteeism is not attendance. Its presence, which means that people are genuinely and fully there, rather than physically in the room and emotionally somewhere else.
What we do differently
We Work At The Root, Not The Surface.
At the centre of everything we do is Head-to-Heart Healing, a structured method for helping people understand and release the emotional weight that has been quietly driving their disengagement, depletion, and underperformance.
This is not therapy, and it’s not coaching. It’s structured personal guidance. It’s inner work delivered in a professional setting, designed to produce outer results. We address the root causes of presenteeism, the absence of emotional clarity, the lack of tools to look honestly at what people are carrying, and the depletion that becomes self-sustaining once someone has been running on empty long enough. Participants don’t leave with more information. They leave differently.
The Founders
As an original director of Kooth – the UK’s leading digital mental health platform, listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2020 – Steve Roche spent many years operating at the boundary between clinical and non-clinical support. He knows what each is for, and what each isn’t.
Cilla Hall brings a background spanning recruitment, HR, life coaching, and the co-founding of an alternative-provision school programme.
Both founders have walked this path themselves. The method is built from lived experience, refined over more than a decade of practice, and translated specifically for the workplace.
A note on what this isn’t.
Beyond Coping is not a substitute for addressing operating-model issues that cause depletion in the first place. Workload, meeting overload, and out-of-hours norms are organisational design questions, not personal development ones. If we think a programme would amount to wellbeing-washing, emotional work commissioned in place of structural change, we will tell you, and we will decline the work.
Who this is for
HR Directors and Learning & Development leads who:
Are tired of commissioning tick-box wellness and watching nothing change
Know their people need something real and are ready to bring it
Have watched good people quietly disengage, and want to address it before it becomes a retention problem
Need to demonstrate to their board that wellbeing investment is producing measurable outcomes against a recognised baseline.
Sectors where this SERVICE WORKS particularly well
Financial services – where the pressure is relentless, the stakes are public, and emotional literacy is rarely on the agenda.
Professional services and legal – where high performance is the baseline, billable expectations compound, and burnout is normalised.
Healthcare and public sector – where operational pressures are structural and recovery time is rarely built in.
Technology and creative – where output is everything and inner depletion goes unseen until someone leaves.
The Beyond Coping Programme
A structured pathway from surface-level coping to genuine, sustainable presence and performance.
The offering comprises three group interventions and one individual intervention that address three interconnected drivers of presenteeism. Organisations can enter the programme at any point. Many start with one workshop and decide from there.
1. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE
FUll-day workshop
A diagnostic day. People leave with clarity about what has actually been driving their depletion.
2. MAKE YOURSELF A PRIORITY
full-day workshop
A practical day on the operating principles of sustainable performance.
3. THE DEEP RESET
2 full dayS OFF-SITE
The complete process, end-to-end. Designed for senior people whose continued depletion has organisational consequences.
4. BEYOND COPING
PERSONAL GUIDANCE SESSIONS
Employer-funded 6-session block for individuals whose role and depletion warrant deeper support.
Strategic Consulting
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BREATHE — Recognition
(Half-day workshop)
Your people learn to recognise what they’re carrying — the invisible patterns from our Nine-Block Framework that show up as reactivity, depletion, and disengagement. The shift starts with being able to see clearly what’s actually happening.
LOVE — Acceptance
(Half-day workshop)
Self-care, boundaries, and the honest foundations of sustainable performance. Practical tools your people can use from the following Monday. Not soft skills — the skills that make everything else possible.
HEAL — Release
(Full-day intensive)
Using our Head-to-Heart Healing™ method, participants work through and release the emotional weight that’s been driving the patterns. This is the session that produces lasting change. People arrive one way and leave another.
Make It Make Sense
FULL DAY WORKSHOP
The problem this addresses: people don’t understand what’s going on with themselves mentally and emotionally.
Most people in a presenteeism state are being run by thoughts, feelings, and patterns they have never properly examined. They can feel its weight, but they cannot name it. And what cannot be named cannot be addressed.
Through a guided process of supported self-examination, participants learn to understand their thoughts and feelings rather than simply experience them. They begin to see the patterns driving their behaviour and depletion, often for the first time. They leave not with a plan or a toolkit, but with something more valuable at this stage – a genuine understanding of what has been going on.
What participants gain:
The ability to understand their feelings rather than be overwhelmed by them.
Clarity about the thoughts and stories that have been running the show.
An understanding of the patterns underneath their reactions and behaviour.
A map of their own inner world.
Format: Full day, in person. Co-facilitated by Steve Roche and Cilla Hall.
The problem this addresses: people have stopped looking after themselves and don’t know how to start again.
Depletion doesn’t just come from emotional weight. It comes from years of putting everything and everyone else first. Of running on empty and calling it dedication. Of never having been shown that looking after yourself isn’t a luxury but the foundation of everything else.
This day begins with honesty about what genuine self-care actually is. Not bubble baths and early nights, but the practice of meeting your own needs across every dimension of your life: physical, emotional, mental, relational, and purposeful. It addresses directly the real reasons most people don’t do it. This includes the conditioning that says putting yourself first is selfish, the identity built around being needed, and the unconscious belief that rest must be earned.
The people most likely to be running on empty are often the most committed, the most capable, and the most conscientious. They don’t neglect themselves because they don’t care. They do it because no one has ever shown them what it costs. This day changes that.
What participants gain:
An honest understanding of what genuine self-care is and what it isn’t.
Clarity about the specific patterns and beliefs that have been preventing them from prioritising themselves.
Practical tools for building self-care into real life without it becoming another item on the list.
Permission, perhaps for the first time, to treat their own wellbeing as non-negotiable.
Format: Full day, in person. Co-facilitated by Steve Roche and Cilla Hall.
The problem this addresses: understanding and awareness aren’t enough on their own.
Both day-long workshops create real movement. But for people carrying the most and for those in roles where the cost of continued depletion is highest, understanding what is there and knowing how to look after yourself better is not the complete answer. The emotional weight itself needs to be released, not just managed.
The Deep Reset takes participants through the complete Beyond Coping programme in a single, uninterrupted two-day experience. Day one builds on the Make It Make Sense and Make Yourself A Priority work, going deeper into awareness, clarity, and the foundations of sustainable performance. Day two covers the entire Head-to-Heart Healing process from understanding what participants are carrying through to releasing it.
This is not a team away day with a wellness theme. It is not leadership development with reflection time added in. It is a transformation experience designed for senior people whose continued depletion is materially affecting their leadership, their team, or their own health.
What participants gain:
The complete Make It Make Sense experience: understanding what has been driving their depletion.
The complete Make Yourself A Priority experience: understanding what genuine self-care means for them specifically.
The complete Head-to-Heart Healing process: moving from understanding to genuine emotional release.
A shared language and shared experience with their colleagues that no team-building exercise can manufacture.
Format: Two days off-site, at a venue of your choice or one we source and manage. Full co-facilitation across both days by Steve Roche and Cilla Hall.
Price: From £6,000 for groups of up to 10, excluding venue and accommodation. Full quotation tailored to group size and organisational context.
Some people need more than a group experience can provide. They include those carrying the most emotional weight, those in the most demanding roles, and those whose depletion is materially affecting their leadership, their team, or their own health.
The personal guidance sessions take the form of 3-hour face-to-face sessions with both Steve and Cilla, working through the complete Head-to-Heart Healing process at a pace that suits the individual. Sessions typically take place every two to four weeks, allowing time for integration between each one.
The employer funds a block of 6 sessions per individual to create genuine, sustained movement. If the individual wishes to continue beyond the employer block, they can do so by self-funding.
This is not therapy. It is structured personal guidance from two people who have walked the path and know the way. Where clinical treatment is what someone needs, we say so and help them find it.
Format: Six sessions of three hours, every two to four weeks. Two-to-one (Cilla and Steve, one participant). Delivered at a venue of your choice.
Price: From £1,500 per individual for the six-session employer-funded block.
“The process didn’t just help me understand these patterns intellectually. It gave me the tools to actually release what I’d been holding onto for decades.”
— Theresa H
“What makes their approach so powerful is that it doesn’t let you hide from yourself. You simply cannot lie or make excuses, the process demands complete honesty, and that’s a big reason why it works.”
— Anthony Bethell
“Since completing the process, something within me has shifted. I feel lighter, clearer, and more grounded in who I am.”
— Michelle Dunbar
Next Steps
If the Beyond Coping wellbeing programme feels relevant for your organisation, the first step is a 60-minute conversation. We use that hour to understand what your people are experiencing, what you have already commissioned, and what you are trying to achieve. If we think Beyond Coping is the right intervention, we’ll outline what a programme would look like for your team, including the timeline and budget. If we don’t, we’ll tell you and, where we can, we’ll point you toward what would serve you better.
Beyond Coping is a programme of Head, Heart & Soul Ltd. Head-to-Heart Healing™ is a trademark of Head, Heart & Soul Ltd. Professionally indemnity insured. Standard DBS checks are in place.
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Stop Being Who Other People Need. Start Being Who You Are.
Each month, we take an ordinary part of life, money, love, self-care, the friendships that have drifted, and look at it honestly through your head, your heart and your soul. A bit of timeless wisdom in plain words, one gentle question to sit with, and no advice you’ve heard a hundred times. Because you’re not broken, you’re just disconnected from your true self.
Whenever we run an offer on our workshops, sessions, or retreats, you’ll find the details in this newsletter. It’s just our way of saying thank you for joining us.
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